Botox Mom Gets Busted By CPS, But Are They Doing Enough?

Child Protective Services have at last looked into the case of Botox Mom, the San Francisco pageant-pusher who gave her 8-year-old daughter Botox and bikini waxes (among other "beauty treatments"). I'm glad that little Britney is in a safe place and hopefully won't be getting more needles stuck in her face anytime soon.

But why does it seem like CPS too often takes their time investigating obvious nut-jobs like this woman? Sometimes they wait so long that a kid ends up dead.

Advertisement

It seems like every other day there's another horrific story on the news about a child who's been chained to a radiator and starved to death or beaten into a comatose state or, hmm, I don't know, driven into the Hudson River? Meanwhile, I've known moms who managed to raise warning flags over innocent, everyday injuries.

One was a mother of two boys, ages 2 and 4, who spent a good solid few hours at the playground every afternoon. Guess what? Little boys like to jump off of high stuff, particularly when, say, Mommy has turned her back to make sure your brother didn't just eat a piece of chalk or something. My friend's 2-year-old pulled this stunt twice in one month, both times giving himself a decent enough bump on the head for his mom to take him to the emergency room as a precautionary measure. About a week after the second incident, CPS came knocking at my friend's door: Someone on staff at the ER had called in a "tip" based on the little boy's boo-boos. In the end, the CPS workers apologized to my friend for "wasting her time."

But who knows how many seriously abused kids got passed over that day? Another family I knew earned a dreaded CPS visit when blood tests from their toddler's routine check-up showed high lead levels. The parents were renovating their (very old) home at the time; still, they were treated as if they'd been force-feeding their daughter lead paint chips with her applesauce.

Of course it's better to be safe than sorry. Of course it is. It just seems like something in the system needs to be tweaked in a big, big way if kids are going to be kept truly safe.